


just to find my heart is beating

by chymyg (greetingsfrommaars)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Magic, Blood and Injury, Curses, Demons, Gen, Haunted Houses, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, cheery child jeno, demon dad doyoung, strangers to FAMILIAL UNITS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27307186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greetingsfrommaars/pseuds/chymyg
Summary: The locals say the house is cursed. Doyoung would know, of course. He’s the one who cursed it.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung & Lee Jeno
Comments: 14
Kudos: 58
Collections: NCT Spookfest 2020





	just to find my heart is beating

**Author's Note:**

> title from "bleeding out" by imagine dragons

He can’t believe they talked him into this.

A stick snaps underfoot, and he jumps. He peers around – none of them followed him to see him embarrass himself like some wimpy preschooler. At least he’s got that going for him.

He catches sight of a humanoid figure in the window and almost swears before he realizes.

His reflection shakes a fist back at him.

The house looms large as he approaches. He swallows down around the pulse thundering in his throat. Why did he let them taunt him? Why did he ever agree to this? His fist clenches around the stone. It’ll leave imprints on his fingers, and his mother will tut at the sight when he’s home.

See, there’s a safe thought. Home.

If he were walking up to his house right now, he’d see the light already on in the kitchen, his mother insisting on it even though his father complains at the waste of electricity.

He’s coming up to a first-floor window. He can almost imagine a light streaming through the grime, lighting up some hunched figure in the kitchen. What kind of sorry loser lives in a house like this? He can picture it now: sunken eyes, sallow skin, a voice like metal scraping on stone. He shudders.

Before he can chicken out, he pivots his arm back and lets the stone fly. It sails in a clean arc to the floor on the other side of the window.

He listens for the thud.

His breath shudders as it rushes through his chest. They’d said no one would be here during the day, but they’ve made mistakes before. Mistakes he paid for with his own freedom, once his parents found out. He almost wishes they had followed him, just to even out the blame a little. He doesn't need anyone to hold his hand or anything. He needs plausible deniability.

A stick snaps behind him.

He jumps again. Then he braces for the laughter – should’ve known they’d sneak up behind him to make sure he did the deed. He turns with a smirk. “Hey, losers, way to go back on your –”

The wind rushes across the empty yard to greet him.

He shoves his hand in his pocket before it can start shaking. It’s fine. It’s just a stupid squirrel or something. He shivers in the sudden wind that rises, tossing the trees and rustling the leaves through the scraggly weeds. He'd thought maybe it would make him feel brave, rising to meet their taunts, but now he just feels cold.

But he’s free to go now. He’s already turned his back on his tiny act of vandalism. He almost wants to peep a second look at the damage, check out how far it got on the floor on the other side. Might as well admire his hard work, while he can, before –

_Knock knock._

Before someone catches him.

The sound comes from behind.

You have your back to it, he reminds himself. If you take off now, they won’t know your face.

_Knock._

They all said the house was haunted. He figures, if he turns now, either he sees a ghost and automatically wins every game of chicken for the next year, or he sees an angry houseowner and ends up on the outs with his parents for months.

He can’t bring himself to lift one leg. That one step seems impossibly far.

_Knock knock._

The trees can sound like a person knocking sometimes, he reckons.

His heart squeezes in a phantom fist. He has to know for sure. He has to – to brag about it, or –

The first thing he sees is teeth.

He almost doesn’t recognize them, at first. He stares at the window blankly – the first thing he sees is yellow, broken into long, jagged columns. Then he traces a winding stain the color of old bruises, as it creeps up the side of one column, to where it ends at a serrated edge, and he realizes. They lie in a crooked row, each as tall as he is, rooted in the rotting floorboards, impossibly long to hide the gaping maw behind. He faces the window, mouth open in a choked scream, and he knows unthinkingly that the mouth could swallow him whole, and then there would be nothing more of him.

The second thing he sees is eyes.

The second thing he sees is a pair of piercing lights overhead like an oncoming train. They blink. Then they fix on him, and he becomes impossibly small, a speck, a tiny flea.

Finally, he regains enough of his mind to stumble backwards. He trips and lands badly on his arm.

He can’t look back.

He’s sprinting, screaming, stumbling over himself to burst through the gate and practically collapse on the dusty road.

When he arrives home, his mother will scold him to high heaven for the state of his trousers, but her words will barely reach him. His eyes look straight through her to the far distance. The gibbering starts. The words to describe what he’s seen slip through his mind like silver-quick fish, flashing into a view for a moment, then they’re gone.

In the wake of his hasty departure, the teeth settle into bars of light filtering through a far railing, the eyes into light streaming through windows at the far end of the house. In the absence of onlookers, the house seems to soften, to sit back on its haunches to wait.

He shudders and does not hear his mother when she asks what’s wrong. In his mind’s eye, a house. An eerie light through the first-floor window. Too many teeth, eyes widening past comprehension to peer into the very heart of him and leave him with a single, trembling thought.

Engraved in his mind: when he turns back at the bottom of the road, hardly believing his eyes, the man in the window raises a hand and waves.

-

The children do not bother Doyoung for many years after that. No parent will allow their child within a mile of him.

-

It wasn’t always like this. At least, Doyoung doesn’t think it was. Surely once upon a time, the house stood proud and new. Welcoming. He hasn’t seen the house by its exterior in years, but judging by the looks on their faces, it falls somewhere on the scale between pitiful and treacherous. Just like him.

He’s sure that once upon a time, he was alive. He can almost remember it. When he looked upon the world, a light of curiosity or motivation or _some_ kind of feeling shined through.

Now, the only mirror he has to see himself by is the terrified whites of the humans’ eyes as they take in the sight of him. Of the house, rather. It has been an eternity since the time when he had his own body. All these years trapped, and now he’s not sure where the house’s decay ends and where his agony begins. It’s all the same, in the end.

-

Doyoung has seen men like this before.

Men who leave the house at dusk and return at dawn, to collapse into oblivion on the couch until the cycle repeats again. Men who slam every door, on every entrance and exit, as if asserting their presence will fill up the emptiness of a silent house. Men who collect unwashed bottles like dirty secrets under the sink, because leaving them out in the house makes you a drunken mess, but taking them out in public makes you a messy drunk. Suddenly your vices become everyone else’s business.

This man’s sins are very much his own. He’s loath to share them with anyone else.

This man has dry spells, sometimes. He swears off the bottle for a week or two – peels all the labels from his bottles like it’ll hide their contents – carts them off to the corner for recycling and hurries back inside so no one will realize they’re his. Were his. He’s gotten rid of them now. He’ll run a duster along the banisters for a bit, maybe rearrange the furniture for a change of pace. He lets the chair legs drag along the floor when he does. It leaves long scars in the wood, the scraping sound grating through Doyoung’s ears, the same way it stings when the man leaves tiny gouges on the walls with his broken bottles. This is how Doyoung knows: it will never last.

Doyoung knew a man like this, once. He has seen many kindred sinners since then. They all come like this, those who come to stay: regretful, repentant (but not enough), newly alone in this dump on the edge of the forest.

Well, not alone. But they never realize that at first.

-

Perhaps it was at the fiftieth drunken assault on his walls, or at the five-hundredth, that Doyoung began to recede into himself. It was not so much a conscious decision as an instinct to duck his head down, numb to the onslaught. These interlopers could drown themselves all they like – he refused to sink down with them, even if that meant closing himself off from the only place he existed.

Now, he thinks, if he simply closes his eyes – shutters his mind – lives from one quiet spell to the next – all this exists somewhere beyond him. This is how he can watch this man leave wounds all over _his_ house with no anger. Not even pity. Almost no feeling at all.

Almost. Sometimes Doyoung shifts a chair or a table a few inches over as the man sleeps, just to spectate the tantrum that results when it invariably results in a stubbed toe. If he had the energy, Doyoung would scramble all of the furniture in the sitting room – now _that’d_ make him scream – but the satisfaction would only last a few moments in the face of the acrid taste that accompanies the man’s longer bouts of rage. These small moments of petty retribution are all Doyoung has to entertain himself now.

The locals say the house is cursed. Doyoung would know, of course. He’s the one who cursed it.

-

Doyoung does not know how many years it’s been, when he awakens again.

He wakes to the sound of pattering feet and an excited voice. A small body runs through his entrance hall, tracing the wall with a light touch. He feels a shiver of anticipation at the contact. New blood for these old halls.

The man barks out a reprimand from the entrance. _Ah, so you’re still alive_ , Doyoung observes. He cannot dredge up any particular feeling about it.

The child – a real, live, human child! what a novelty – settles down when scolded, though a spark of mischief still lights his eyes. Doyoung startles at the shock of playfulness that springs through the wall from the child’s hand. The last time a child walked these halls, a bespectacled woman came within a week to check off safety hazards on a clipboard and whisk him away to some place more suitable for child-rearing. Good riddance, Doyoung figured. The child would have ended up sticking himself on an exposed plank sooner or later, smearing his blood everywhere, and then no one would be happy.

This child seems just as ambivalent towards the man – his father? his guardian? There’s no way that sorry creature had the kind of nerve to kidnap a child. He turns to lock the door, and the child sees his chance. Snatching up a loose board leaning on the wall, he ambushes the man with a bright war cry. The board is unwieldy to hold, but noble and strong in its new form: the child’s sword.

The man slaps him away without a second thought.

The child stumbles against the wall, watching with wide eyes as the man stalks away. A swell of shock, cold and bracing, seeps into the floor where he crumples, sniffling, now noticing the splinters in his hands. That board had fallen from the crumbling eaves overhead. Even the bits and pieces of Doyoung’s being are anything but kind.

Feeling a new wave of misery wash over the front hall, Doyoung blocks off that area from his mind. He’s seen all he needs to see.

Give it a few years, if the child lasts that long. He’ll learn.

-

Doyoung can’t sleep. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The hurried drumbeat of the child’s feet breaks through the lull of nothingness. The man leaves the child alone during the day (which is a level of freedom Doyoung envies), so of course he runs wild.

The child spends his first days in the house running about recklessly, peering into every crack and crevice. If he’s looking for mice or other vermin, he’ll be sorely disappointed. The animals have had the sense to leave Doyoung and his house be.

Doyoung does wonder what it’s like to see the house through new eyes. He supposes it can’t be possible to have a worse first impression than his.

Still, he cringes at the child’s distracting bursts of enthusiasm.

He’d been doing, well, not fine, but he’d found his near oblivion to be a welcome reprieve. He doesn’t need this kind of excitement in his existence. Besides, sooner or later the man will notice. He always makes the doors shudder on their hinges when he’s angry.

Doyoung has had enough, he decides.

-

They’d had to replace the entire floor before putting the house up for sale, the first time. Walked right in like they owned the place, then balked at the bloody concentric circles carved into the sitting room floor. What kind of psycho used to live here? they asked. Then they set about forgetting all about him, and called a repairman.

If nothing else, Doyoung was glad to see the carvings go.

They had no idea what to do about the door that always groaned when it swung open, no matter how many times they oiled it, or the disquieting creaks of the house settling after a windy day, but there wasn’t much money left after replacing the floor anyway. It’s not like they could have rebuilt the entire foundation, though Doyoung almost wishes they did, sometimes. Maybe he would have been long gone then.

In any case, cursed things had happened in that house, and Doyoung would never let them forget it.

In the years that followed, even with the new flooring, an odd stain grew from the heart of the sitting room like a spreading pool of ink. They tried every household cleaner they can think of, and then just hours of scrubbing, until their arms came away dyed crimson up to the elbow, and they were forced to concede. They dumped a rug over it and called it a stylistic decision.

Back then, Doyoung was still new to the sensation of existing without flesh. Sometimes the gouges in his chest still ached, raw and seeping red, and he’d raise a hand to touch them. He had no hands. He found a ringing emptiness where his chest should be. A door opened inside, and strangers came spilling out.

Even without limbs or skin, they could still dig their hands into the soft parts of him, he learned.

-

The child is eyeing the stairway railing, contemplating sliding something down it (such as himself, headfirst), when it happens. He hears a distant sound from below. His uncle isn’t home – he’d be stomping around like a dinosaur if he were. So who could it be? The child comes down to investigate.

At the foot of the stairwell, something shines: a coin.

He gasps and reaches down. But when he opens his hand for inspection, his palm is empty.

A sound of rolling. He looks up to find another coin, coming to a stop two hops away. Or is it the same coin, in a new spot?

He leaps upon it to cover it with both hands. If it’s a magic coin, maybe it can hop away like a frog!

The floor is bare again when he lifts his hands. But he sees how this goes now: there’s a sound of rolling…

It’s a fun game, chasing the coin down the hall and up to the door at the end. The door did give him a bit of trouble, he’ll admit. He has never understood why, but his uncle always keeps boxes stacked high in front, which seems all sorts of silly. Aren’t doors like this meant for keeping things out of sight behind them? And how will anyone get in with the way blocked off like that? How would anyone get out?

But he still manages, like he always does. It takes just a little huffing and puffing, and then he’s through. The stairs lead down into the darkness before him.

Never one to hesitate, he takes the first step.

The door swings shut behind him. The lock clicks.

There, Doyoung thinks vindictively. That’ll do it. This is a child, so it won’t even take that much theatrics to leave him shaking. Even that foolish adult will have the sense to flee when he returns to find his ward screaming from the locked basement. That, or he’ll scold the child into giving up his daytime wanderings. Doyoung will have peace, one way or another.

A glittering presence rises in Doyoung’s senses, like sunlight dancing on swirling dust. It takes shape into a gentle tendril unfolding, from the child’s outstretched hand to the blocking door. _Click._ It unlocks.

Like magic.

The realization jolts Doyoung awake like an administered shock.

Like _magic._

-

The child hasn’t yet had the chance to learn that his magic is special. That it is small but precious, to be held close to his chest.

Doyoung is now doubly glad the man disappears outside every day like clockwork. Not only does it give Doyoung the chance to pretend he doesn’t exist, but it gives him the full day to feel the warm bursts of magic flashing here and there as the child explores his new toy.

Because that’s all it is to him: a toy. He is a child, with the inane concerns and desires of a child, and when he discovers the magic in him, his first instinct is to play.

Doyoung watches in bemusement as a parade of silverware marches in line through the air, to the tune of the child laughing and clapping his hands together.

It reminds Doyoung of little games he used to play himself, in another self: putting the dishes away without using his hands, as his mother gaped. Flattening out a fairy circle for himself in the forest, with just a wave of his hands, to lay down in the weeds and feel magical for a few breaths. Letting a fabric of magic fall over his frame like a warm cloak, hiding him from view, tucked away from the others. He always was the best at that game.

Those games didn’t save him when they finally came for him. The thought tastes of iron now.

The child takes free reign over the house while the daylight shines in, and Doyoung leaves him be.

The child discovers the step that always creaks, the one that makes the adults nervous. It makes him giggle and jump on it again. It almost makes Doyoung groan, but he knows the louder reaction would only spur him on.

Doyoung just accepts the momentary distraction for what it is. He could do worse, after all.

-

The man wakes up covered in blood.

For the first few breaths, he stares at his hands, barely comprehending. Then he shouts. Looks around wildly. He feels it running over his eyes. He feels it dripping down the back of his neck into his shirt.

Legs half tangled into the sheets, he tumbles to the floor and can’t find purchase to pull himself upright. The floor is sticky. Was it already sticky? Was it his hands that did that? He surges to his feet, kicks off the blankets.

The floor seems to swallow each step as he tries to run, giving way under his feet like he’s kneading flesh instead of hardwood floors. He looks down in terror. He can’t see the floorboards under all the blood he’s trailing, leaving blotches over the skin. He sees the spreading puddle beneath him and imagines it’s a bruise blooming under his pounding feet, but he can barely the surface now, submerged as it is in the mess of crimson. Now his feet drag as the puddle congeals, and now he can barely wrench them from the floor. Now he can barely feel them.

With a sudden horror, he realizes that the spreading pool is his own flesh. Now his feet have melted into the bloody mass, now his knees; it’s coming up on his hips and then he won’t be able to run - he’ll have to drag himself by the arms. There go his ribs, his heart beating a frantic staccato as it collapses. He barely chokes out a scream before his throat goes.

The last part of him to disappear is a hand, reaching out and grasping nothing.

The man wakes up and kicks his blankets to the ground. Sleep is a long time coming after that.

-

Doyoung can’t breathe.

For a single choked moment, the panic sets in.

A small whimper, and the world sets itself back to rights.

Of course Doyoung can’t breathe. He’s not a person anymore. The child, on the other hand, is dreaming, thrashing in his sheets, and he can’t breathe.

His fear hangs heavy in the air around him, weighs down on his bedroom walls with a suffocating pressure. Doyoung hates the leaden taste. He's swallowed it down many times before, of course. People here are always afraid, of obsolescence, of defaulting on loans, of each other’s cruel hands. Of Doyoung, when he chooses to make his presence known. But this is the fear of a child, irrational, yet leaving you trembling under the bedsheets til dawn. There are nameless shapes in the dark that you cannot identify. There are beings lurking just past each doorway, spreading hands like gnarled branches to snatch you unawares.

Doyoung may be the dark spectre in the door, but this fear exists in him, too.

He awakens, trapped. There are voices inside of him, all of them shouting. There comes the drumming of many feet against his insides, drowning out what heartbeat he might have remembered. The cacophony swells in a mockery of song, and he loses himself in the wall of sound. Awash in all the world’s ills, it seems, all the world’s miseries, and the greatest is his own. He awakens again and again, trapped. He has no mouth. He cannot scream.

The child jerks awake at the crash of his lamp toppling to the floor.

-

The child knows he’s there.

Doyoung should have known, honestly. He never was good at fading into the background once he’d already been seen. As he had once feared, he was starting to go soft – just the other day, the child had dropped a glass as he tottered to the kitchen sink, and suddenly it was the simplest thing to let the ground give, a little, upon meeting it, catching the glass in a cupped palm instead on unforgiving hardwood. It had touched the floor with a clear, ringing sound, before rolling right back to the child’s feet. He beamed then, and dumped all the dirty glasses in the sink with a graceless clatter, and beamed even wider.

When he dried each glass, he placed it back on the counter with a comical seriousness, tongue poking out in concentration. He stood back to contemplate his job well done.

Doyoung contemplated the thought of knocking them all down into his open, trusting face.

But he hadn’t. And now he has to contend with the result: the child _talks_ to him. Rises in the morning with a chipper greeting, trips in the hallway with a polite apology, plays around the noisiest floorboards with a quick thanks. Apparently the child had recognized the presence of another, after the basement, and after finding no denizen in human form, concluded that the only suspect left was the house itself.

That kind of logic, and the way he occasionally leapfrogs from room to room instead of walking, are the least of the child’s confusing tendencies.

Doyoung resigns himself to learning them all. The lengths one must go to pass the time.

-

The man is toweling off the grime from his faces when he notices.

There’s a faint sting on his palm. When he pulls back to glower at it, he spots a thin red line tracing across it. He makes a fist. It digs into the cut, and he curses.

He curses out his boss for driving him so hard he didn’t notice this before, and then he curses his shoddily made tools. Always knew it’d come to this. Maybe he can sue and drag a nice payday for himself out of it. He washes out the cut and forgets about it.

There’s a knife on the kitchen table this morning. He smacks his head with an open palm when he spits it. Stupid piece of crap – even he knows not to leave things out in the open before he gets shitfaced. Never know what could happen, he thinks, flexing his hand. It doesn’t even hurt. Never know what could happen – he could really screw up, could end up with something way worse than –

The cut is gone.

He pokes at the unblemished skin. It gives.

Maybe he’d dreamt it.

He rinses off the knife and forgets about it.

His hand stings when he stretches it out for the bottle. He ignores it, takes the swig he was going for, then takes a look. A thin red line traces across his palm. Well, shit. He drinks again. Supposed to numb his pain, right?

It's a pretty narrow slice. It can be a problem for the him of the morning, the poor sod.

He falls asleep in a heap on the floor and wakes up the next morning sore all over.

His pain courses from joint to joint, but leaves his palm alone, and he thinks nothing of it.

He’s three ingredients into a pretty shit stew when he realizes: he can’t find the damn knife. At this point, there's no going back. Either he finds it and completes his slop of champions, or he’s stuck with his feast for miserable bastards.

He’s been trying to be more careful lately. He’s not going to be this young and handsome forever - he should take it easy a little, make sure he doesn’t break his nice face, since it’s the only thing he’s got going for him. A knife of all things, he would definitely pay attention to, so where the hell did he leave it?

It’s on the kitchen table.

He eyes it with suspicion. There’s a brownish line glistening down the very edge of the blade, like he’d forgotten to wash it before dumping it to rust on the table of all places.

He tries not to look at the stain while he washes it off, but he can’t avoid it, if he wants to keep his hand unscathed. He can already picture the thin red line, there on his palm. Narrow and long like the blade in his hands.

Instead of using it, he ends up putting it away. Resolves to leave it there until the image fades.

He wakes up and, for the first few beats, can’t figure out why. Then the pain registers.

A thin red line tracing across his palm.

In the morning, he rises and goes down.

There’s a knife.

-

He’d gotten used to the feeling of the child’s magic over time, if not the nonsensical patterns of his whims. It comes in bursts, a sort of gentle, localized explosions, and when it lingers, it flickers like a sparkler slowly winding down. Doyoung has come to liken the feeling to sparks leaping from the child’s blaze of magic to tickle at the boards and bolts of Doyoung’s being.

It has never felt like this.

This magic pricks at Doyoung from closer within, like a needle under the skin.

When he examines the site of intrusion, he finds the child with his hands slathered in peanut butter. To Doyoung’s horror, the child presses them to a dent in the wall, where the man had sunk a fist the year before. The open wound still gapes, and Doyoung seethes at the reminder.

Then he feels a tingling of magic. The sticky mess sinks into the splintered surface like water, transmuting into a hard shell. The wood shines like new.

The child passes a hand over it, feeling for cracks, then announces: “All done!”

Doyoung feels a blank sense of shock. Not only that, he can tell the shock is purely his own – this is exactly what the child had intended.

All that he could use his magic for, and he chooses this?

-

_Hello_

The letters are scrawled large enough that a passerby could read them from the street below.

_I… am… Jeno_

_What’s your name?_ The child – Jeno – holds out the pencil by the tips of his fingers, leaving space for another hand above.

Doyoung is impressed in spite of himself.

_doyoung_

He tries his best to keep it legible. If anything, Jeno looks even happier when the pencil moves in his hand.

_6… yrs… old. How… old… are… you?_

_don’t know_

A burst of surprise, like a liquid-filled candy on the tongue.

Doyoung’s glee is even sweeter.

-

He always did like children. Too young for extreme cruelty, too underdeveloped for genuine emotions. Doyoung can sift out their shallow emotions and breathe.

This baby, too, laughs and claps its hands at the sight of its toys floating in the air around it. Emboldened, Doyoung lets them sway a little as they circle, as if they’re dancing. Maybe Doyoung really does have care within him.

There’s a scream. The toys crash to the ground. The mother wilts at the door, looks about ready to faint, but powers through to whisk her child away from the falling toys. I didn’t mean it, Doyoung wants to say. I would never –

She slams the door on the way out, and it feels like a lash to the back. Foolish boy.

-

It’s just as well, really. Doyoung was starting to have dangerous thoughts. He’d tried to resist the temptation at first. It was preposterous, fully head and shoulders outside of the bounds of reality. It was presumptuous of him. He has no corporeal form; he’s indelibly anchored to a crumbling house; he hasn’t used magic the human way in so long.

It’s just that it would be an embarrassment to him, honestly. Imagine harboring a magic-user from childhood, and finding at the end that the brat doesn’t even know the extent of his power? Unacceptable.

Doyoung may not have the same magic anymore, but he _is_ magic. They’d ensured it when they bound him here. He may not have had any mentor when he was alive, but he’s certainly better equipped than that sorry excuse for a guardian to provide attention and care.

Doyoung feels a sudden, alien thrill of excitement. He’s never had a child before.

-

Jeno grows up like this: he knows nothing of helping hands, or supportive smiles, or kind words. Neither he nor Doyoung has had the chance to learn them, yet. But this, he knows: a set of footsteps that follow his, keeping him company up and down the stairs. A warm imprint of a hand on the bathroom mirror, matching his raised palm with long, elegant fingers.

The dark is always watching, and he knows he isn’t alone.

At seven, he weaves outlandish tales, with shot glasses and discarded wood as his puppets, and Doyoung listens. Sometimes, he even puppets some of them himself, and lets Jeno give them funny voices.

At nine, he plays clap-off-beat games with the shadows in every corner. Doyoung watches him run around the house, knowing every nook and cranny, and he feels the deepest sense of satisfaction, his smiling face as familiar to Doyoung as the worn steps of his own staircase.

At thirteen, he trips into the beginning of the end.

-

He can’t live like this anymore.

When he’d first moved in, it’d been nightmare after nightmare, to the point that he couldn’t sleep, and he almost dozed off on the job. That was one thing. But then that little freak showed up, and it somehow got worse.

The constant sense that something was hovering behind him while he wasn’t looking. The constant sound of footsteps in the night, but nothing when he got up to check. Random shit left in random places around the house, and those freaky dolls the kid made and left places like some kind of voodoo shit.

He tells himself he’ll take care of it, the same way he tells himself he’ll rein in his impulses a bit, he’ll find a new job, he’ll move out of this dump.

He’ll put an end to it, he will, or he doesn’t deserve to be called a man.

-

The man thinks that Jeno never talks. Sometimes, he mutters mean things about him as he skirts around the edge of the room to avoid him, and Jeno ducks his head down to trace patterns on the floor.

They always twist and turn and lead back to the start, the same way his uncle always circles around back to his old taunts. He insults his intelligence, first. Then, he progresses to calling Jeno cursed, full of witchcraft, though it’s impossible that he’d know the truth. It was the very first promise Doyoung extracted out of him, once Jeno figured out how to talk to him: to never perform magic where another may see it.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Jeno doesn’t have anyone else he’d like to show it to.

It never occurs to Jeno, to be afraid.

He pities them, instead. Imagine living in a house that doesn’t hold the floorboards still under your feet when you sneak around at night. A house where the walls don’t swell and give like a great big bellows, breathing steady through the night.

They whisper and shriek about thumps in the night, but Jeno knocks back. He sends his dots and dashes as knocks and scratches, and Doyoung answers, because once Jeno left out a book on morse code (completely by accident, of course), and Doyoung devoured it within days.

They make quite a pair, the two of them. Doyoung rages on about his curse on the house, how he’s a blight on all he meets, and then he tugs up the covers a little tighter to warm Jeno as he sleeps. Jeno shrugs off his uncle’s words, his accusations of curses and devilry, then turns around and strengthens the very foundation of the true curse that befalls the house they live in.

He embarks on the child’s version of a home improvement project: he fixes everything with magic and a good helping of sticky condiments.

-

It ends much as it began: Jeno, kneeling on the ground, a coin in his palm. He closes his fist, then opens: he holds a small screw. Open and close. He has an acorn. He laughs, and Doyoung hums, pleased.

The front door smashes open.

A thrill of terror runs through him with the realization: the man had been watching at the window.

Jeno, always safe with Doyoung, flees away from the exits instead of towards them.

Each footfall slams into Doyoung like a hammer’s blow. The man is advancing, snarling about witchcraft. His words fall like hands holding Doyoung down, like blades carving into his skin. Doyoung has not hurt like this in a long time. He hears a cry, and imagines it tears from his lungs at the first slash of a blade, but that’s not quite right. There is no flesh for the blade to catch on. He has no mouth to give voice to his terror.

There’s the tang of blood in the air.

Jeno has fallen. Doyoung can feel every inch of the surface where Jeno presses close, hiding his face in the floor, crying piteously. Doyoung can feel each heavy footfall as it comes ever closer.

Doyoung, in a fit of panic, finally breaks one of his own cardinal rules: he breaks himself to trap the man in the floor.

He has a moment to breathe in the silence that follows. He can feel the man starting to struggle, groaning from below. He can feel each drop that falls from jeno’s wound, meeting the ground in one infinite moment before spreading thin. It seeps into the floor, gathering under Doyoung’s hands.

Doyoung's hands scrape at the floor as he scrambles for balance. His chest heaves in his shock.

His chest swells and gives with each gasp of long-forgotten air. It aches at the sound of Jeno’s pain. Doyoung rises on unsteady feet to find blood staining his soles.

If a blood sacrifice was enough to rid Doyoung of his physical body, he supposes it would be a blood sacrifice that returns it to him.

There’s a whimper. Jeno is still there, on the floor, cradling his injured arm. The man roars from below – something about this blasted child, he’d always known there was something wrong with him, what devil have you summoned now –

That’s enough out of you, Doyoung thinks. The first thing he does with his new hands is this: he rips a post from the railing, ignoring the pain that accompanies it, and brings it down on the man’s head.

For a moment, it’s silent except for Jeno’s soft whines of pain.

Then a smaller body hits Doyoung’s, and he closes his arms around Jeno in bemusement.

Doyoung has only hastened his own end by damaging his house, he knows, but he can’t dredge up any regret about it. Better to focus on Jeno’s future, since he has one. He can’t stay here, of course. He deserves a better teacher than Doyoung and his empty halls. There are places out there where children like them are safe. Jeno has the strength to reach them, Doyoung’s sure. Doyoung will be sorry to see him go, but it has never been about him, has it?

Jeno has a counter-proposal.

The second thing Doyoung does with his hands is this: he puts a hand in Jeno’s bloodsoaked palm and chants the words with him.

Then Jeno leads him out the front door, hand in hand.

-

This place gives him the creeps.

He crumples up the last customer’s receipt and aims for the bin, one eye closed. A near miss.

Why’d that girl have to beg off her shift at the last minute? Now he’s stuck here subbing in, nodding at the customers, giving them their _yes sirs_ and _no madams_ , like some kind of grinning mannequin in the stage show of their lives. He hates the long nights the most, the way the store lights splay across the deserted parking lot and swim into darkness around the edges. If he says he feels watched, his manager’ll call him a nutcase.

There’s a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye.

Squinting out the window, he sees nothing. Should’ve known he’d start to go crazy after the first hour by himself.

Then he blinks again, and he sees it: a figure in the dark, wavering at the far edge, facing him. Just watching.

When he peers more closely, he can make out a rumpled jacket, an arm in a sling, a cap pulled low over the kid’s head.

It’s just a kid. His fear turns to suspicion. He smacks on the window. Just a dumb kid, trying to mess with him. “Hey, kid!” he yells, not caring that the sound won’t make it through the glass. “Buzz off! We’re not running a charity around here!”

But something feels off to him. He squints again, sees the sling, stark white against the inky jacket. Traces down to the ratty pants, to the…

The kid has no feet.

Before his eyes, a tendril of _something_ \- something dark, translucent, sinuous - curls over the kid’s legs, around his waist, up to his head, and swallows him into darkness.

He gulps. Clenches his fists. Squeezes his eyes shut, and wills himself anywhere but here, in this infinite moment.

He opens his eyes.

There’s nothing there, of course.

He watches the light falter at the very edges of sight until the morning comes.

**Author's Note:**

> \- influenced by The Walls Sweat, Black Butler, and The Girl from the Well  
> \- tbh I’ve realized that this is probably a hodgepodge of horror movies I’ve watched/stories I've read, but I’ve decided to be chill with it  
> \- I have a vague plan for a continuation of this, which would involve more members  
> \- this fic has a [tag](https://byuluno.tumblr.com/tagged/just-to-find-my-heart-is-beating) on my tumblr, which you can check out, if you’re interested  
> \- this has been in my brain for at least a year and a half, possibly two, so I'm excited to get it out there! thank you for reading <3


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